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Playing thus with the sound of words, which is still worse than a pun, is the meanest of all conceits. But Shakspeare, when he descends to a play of words, is not always in the wrong; for it is done sometimes to denote a peculiar character, as in the following passage: K. Philip. What say'st thou, boy? look in the lady's face. Lewis. I do, my lord, and in her eye I find

A wonder, or a wond'rous miracle;

The shadow of myself form'd in her eye;
Which, being but the shadow of your son,
Becomes a sun, and makes your son a shadow.
I do protest, I never loved myself

Till now infixed I beheld myself

Drawn in the flatt'ring table of her eye.

Faulconbridge. Drawn in the flatt'ring table of her eye!
Hang'd in the frowning wrinkle of her brow!

And quarter'd in her heart! he doth espy

Himself Love's traitor: this is pity now;

That hang'd, and drawn, and quarter'd, there should be

In such a love so vile a lout as he.-King John, Act II. Sc. 5.

409. A jingle of words is the lowest species of that low wit: which is scarce sufferable in any case, and least of all in an heroic poem; and yet Milton, in some instances, has descended to that puerility:

And brought into the world a world of woe.
-begirt th' Almighty throne

Beseeching or besieging

Which tempted our attempt

At one slight bound high overleap'd all bound.

With a shout

Loud as from number without numbers.

One should think it unnecessary to enter a caveat against an ex pression that has no meaning, or no distinct meaning; and yet somewhat of that kind may be found even among good writers. Such make a sixth class.

His whole

Cleopatra. Now, what news, my Charmion?
Will he be kind? and will he not forsake me?
Am I to live or die? nay, do I live?

Or am I dead? for when he gave his answer,
Fate took the word, and then I lived or died.

Dryden, All for Love, Act II.

If she be coy, and scorn my noble fire,
If her chill heart I cannot move;

Why, I'll enjoy the very love,

And make a mistress of my own desire.

poem,

Cowley, poem inscribed The Request.

inscribed My Picture, is a jargon of the same kind.

-'Tis he, they cry, by whom

Not men, but war itself is overcome.-Indian Queen.

Such empty expressions are finely ridiculed in the Rehearsal:

Was't not unjust to ravish hence her breath,

And in life's stead to leave us naught but death.-Act IV. Sc. 1.

408. Play of words. 409. Jingle of words.

ing to be avoided.

Examples from Shakspeare. When justifiable.

Instance from Milton.-Expressions that have no distinct mear

CHAPTER XVIII.

BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE.

410. Or all the fine arts, painting only and sculpture are in their nature imitative.* An ornamented field is not a copy or imitation

*[This remark of our author requires some qualification. A masterly view of the case is presented in the Third Discourse of Sir Joshua Reynolds, from which the following extracts are taken.-Ed.

"Nature herself is not to be too closely copied. There are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature.

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A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator. "The principle now laid down, that the perfection of this art does not consist in mere imitation, is far from being new or singular. It is, indeed, supported by the general opinion of the enlightened part of mankind. The poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity are continually enforcing this position, that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature."

"All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which, by a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter who aims at the "great style" (the beau idéal of the French). By this means he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted. By this Phidias acquired his fame."

"Thus it is from a reiterated experience and a close comparison of the objects in nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form, if I may so express it, from which every deviation is deformity. But the investigation of this form, I grant, is painful, and I know but of one method of shortening the road; that is by a careful study of the works of the ancient sculptors; who, being indefatigable in the school of nature, have left models of that perfect form behind them which an artist would prefer as supremely beautiful, who had spent his whole life in that single contemplation."-Works, vol. i. discourse iii.

Upon statuary, the same critical writer, in a similar strain, remarks:

In strict propriety, the Grecian statues only excel nature by bringing together such an assemblage of beautiful parts as nature was never known to bestow on one object:

For earth-born graces sparingly impart

The symmetry supreme of perfect art.

It must be remembered that the component parts of the most perfect statue never can excel nature,-that we can form no idea of beauty beyond her works; we can only make this rare assemblage an assemblage so rare that if we are to

of nature, but nature itself embellished. Architecture is productive of originals, and copies not from nature. Sound and motion may in some measure be imitated by music; but for the most part music, like architecture, is productive of originals. Language copies not from nature more than music or architecture; unless where, like music, it is imitative of sound or motion. Thus, in the description ef particular sounds, language sometimes furnisheth words, which, besides their customary power of exciting ideas, resemble by their softness or harshness the sounds described; and there are words which, by the celerity or slowness of pronunciation, have some resemblance to the motion they signify. The imitative power of words goes one step farther: the loftiness of some words makes them proper symbols of lofty ideas; a rough subject is imitated by harsh-sounding words; and words of many syllables, pronounced slow and smooth, are expressive of grief and melancholy. Words have a separate effect on the mind, abstracting from their signification and from their imitative power: they are more or less agreeable to the ear by the fulness, sweetness, faintness, or roughness of their tones.

*

411. These are but faint beauties, being known to those only who have more than ordinary acuteness of perception. Language possesseth a beauty superior greatly in degree, of which we are eminently sensible when a thought is communicated with perspicuity and sprightliness. This beauty of language, arising from its power of expressing thought, is apt to be confounded with the beauty of the thought itself: the beauty of thought, transferred to the expression, makes it appear more beautiful. But these beauties, if we wish to think accurately, must be distinguished from each other. They are in reality so distinct that we sometimes are conscious of the highest pleasure language can afford, when the subject expressed is disagreeable: a thing that is loathsome, or a scene of horror to make one's hair stand on end, may be described in a manner so lively as that the disagreeableness of the subject shall not even obscure the agreeableness of the description. The causes of the original beauty of language, considered as significant, which a branch

give the name of Monster to what is uncommon, we might, in the words of the Duke of Buckingham, call it

A faultless Monster which the world ne'er saw."

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Sir J. Reynolds' Works, vol. ii. p. 811.]

* Chapter ii. part i. sec. 5. Demetrius Phalereus (of Elocution, sec. 75) makes the same observation. We are apt, says that author, to confound the language with the subject; and if the latter be nervous, we judge the same of the former. But they are clearly distinguishable; and it is not uncommon to find subjects of great dignity dressed in mean language. Theopompus is celebrated for the force of his diction, but erroneously; his subject indeed has great force, but his style very little.

410. The fine arts that are imitativo. Sir Joshua Reynold's observations on this point. -The author's remarks on gardening, architecture, language, music.-Imitative power of words.-Agreeableness to the ear.

of the present subject, will be explained in their order. I shall only at present observe that this beauty is the beauty of means fitted to an end, that of communicating thought; and hence it evidently appears, that of several expressions all conveying the same thought, the most beautiful, in the sense now mentioned, is that which in the most perfect manner answers its end.

The several beauties of language above mentioned, being of different kinds, ought to be handled separately. I shall begin with those beauties of language that arise from soun; after which will follow the beauties of language considered as significant; this order appears natural, for the sound of a word is attended to before we consider its signification. In a third section come those singular beauties of language that are derived from a resemblance betweer sound and signification. The beauties of verse are handled in the last section; for though the foregoing beauties are found in verse as well as in prose, yet verse has many peculiar beauties, which, for the sake of connection, must be brought under one view; and versification, at any rate, is a subject of so great importance as to deserve a place by itself.

SECTION I.

Beauty of Language with respect to Sound.

412. THIS subject requires the following order: The sounds of the different letters come first; next, these sounds as united in syllables; third, syllables united in words; fourth, words united in a period; and, in the last place, periods united in a discourse.

With respect to the first article, every vowel is sounded with a 'single expiration of air from the windpipe through the cavity of the mouth. By varying this cavity, the different vowels are sounded; for the air in passing through cavities differing in size, produceth various sounds, some high or sharp, some low or flat: a small cavity occasions a high sound, a large cavity a low sound. The five vowels accordingly, pronounced with the same extension of the windpipe, but with different openings of the mouth, form a regular series of sounds, descending from high to low, in the following order, i, e, a, o, u.* Each of these sounds is agreeable to the ear; and if it be required which of them is the most agreeable, it is perhaps safest to hold that those vowels which are the farthest removed from the ex

*In this scale of sounds, the letter i must be pronounced as in the word interest, and as in other words beginning with the syllable in; the letter e as in persuasion; the letter a as in bat; and the letter u as in number.

411. A superior beauty of language; apt to be confounded with what?-Remark o Demetrius Phalereus.-Beauty of language and of thought to be distinguished.-The sov eral boauties of language that are to be handled.

tremes will be the most relished. This is all I have to remark upon the first article: for consonants being letters that of themselves have no sound, serve only in conjunction with vowels to form articulate sounds; and as every articulate sound makes a syllable, consonants come naturally under the second article, to which we proceed.

A consonant is pronounced-with a less cavity than any vowel; and consequently every syllable into which a consonant enters, must have more than one sound, though pronounced with one expiration of air, or with one breath, as commonly expressed; for however readily two sounds may unite, yet where they differ in tone, both of them must be heard if neither of them be suppressed. For the same reason, every syllable must be composed of as many sounds as there are letters, supposing every letter to be distinctly pronounced.

413. We next inquire how far syllables are agreeable to the ear. Few tongues are so polished as entirely to have rejected sounds that are pronounced with difficulty; and it is a noted observation, That such sounds are to the ear harsh and disagreeable. But with respect to agreeable sounds, it appears that a double sound is always more agreeable than a single sound: every one who has an ear must be sensible that the diphthong oi or ai is more agreeable than any of these vowels pronounced singly the same holds where a consonant enters into the double sound; the syllable le has a more agreeable sound than the vowel e, or than any other vowel.

Having discussed syllables, we proceed to words; which make the third article. Monosyllables belong to the former head; polysyllables open a different scene. In a cursory view, one would imagine, that the agreeableness or disagreeableness of a word with respect to its sound, should depend upon the agreeableness or disagreeableness of its component syllables, which is true in part, but not entirely; for we must also take under consideration the effect of syllables in succession. In the first place, syllables in immediate succession, pronounced each of them with the same or nearly the same aperture of the mouth, produce a succession of weak and feeble sounds; witness the French words dit-il, pathétique: on the other hand, a syllable of the greatest aperture succeeding one of the smallest, on the contrary, makes a succession which, because of its remarkable disagreeableness, is distinguished by a proper name, hiatus. The most agreeable succession is, where the cavity is increased and diminished alternately within moderate limits. Examples, alternative, longevity, pusillanimous. Secondly, words consisting wholly of syllables pronounced slow, or of syllables pronounced quick, commonly called long and short syllables, have little melody in them: witness the words petitioner, fruiterer, dizziness: on the other hand, the intermixture of long and short syllables is remarkably agreeable; for example, degree, repent, wonderful, altitude, rapidity, independent,

412. The order of the subject.-The vowel sounds. How pronounced. The consonant sound.

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